المتخصصون في المجالات الطبية

Overview

Mayo Clinic researchers help to shine new light on bladder cancer tumors.

There are a lot of people that die from bladder cancer, and I think that it's not appreciated what's really involved with that. So I think those are the things that this particular study identifies as one of the few major improvements that we've seen in detection and prevention of recurrences in what we do for gallbladder cancer.

This study looked at comparing those patients that had standard white light, which is the usual light that we resect tumors in, to those that actually had white light first and then subsequently followed by this blue light that fluoresces all the tumors red. And we found a significant improvement in the detection of cancers that would otherwise been missed. So the white light alone detected a certain number, and almost 17% of men found-- or actually, of patients, it was not just men-- but of patients, we found at least one additional low stage tumor that was detected by using the blue light.

Trying to see the tumors are often very difficult. It's a fleshy colored background with some blood vessels, and often very hard to distinguish small tumors. And those small tumors are the ones that are often missed. Or when actually one resects the tumor, you often leave tumor behind that you're not aware of without the right technology. So I think that's the other important thing of this study that shows that we do a better job of resecting the tumors, getting all the tumor out the first time.